51-70k Looking for a small size long life laptop

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reddevilgautam

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As the the topic says, looking for a smallish laptop (13-14 inch) with good performance. My most important criteria is long life - I want to use the laptop for atleast 4 preferably 5 years. I am in real estate and hence would prefer a nice design. Would mainly be used for excel, ppt, docs etc and I would be using it to project on tv etc a lot. Prefer a 16gb RAM.

So far I have shortlisted the Samsung Book 2 Pro 13 inch primarily due to its small stylish design.

Open to macbook M1 as well as Apple generally lasts very long, plus it's a great design as well (I don't have an Apple phone). Would it make sense to buy it 2024?
 
reddevilgautam said:
As the the topic says, looking for a smallish laptop (13-14 inch) with good performance. My most important criteria is long life - I want to use the laptop for atleast 4 preferably 5 years. I am in real estate and hence would prefer a nice design. Would mainly be used for excel, ppt, docs etc and I would be using it to project on tv etc a lot. Prefer a 16gb RAM.

So far I have shortlisted the Samsung Book 2 Pro 13 inch primarily due to its small stylish design.

Open to macbook M1 as well as Apple generally lasts very long, plus it's a great design as well (I don't have an Apple phone). Would it make sense to buy it 2024?
Click to expand...
If you are not too particular about the Oled screen and windows, m1 MacBook would be much better. Yes, it absolutely makes sense to buy it in 2024 as it was sold officially by Apple until a couple of weeks ago. It has much better battery life than the Samsung and runs much cooler.
 
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Would strongly recommend a MacBook Air even at 8gb RAM.
From the description of the kind of workload you're writing about, I think 8gb would be sufficient unless you're running excel spreadsheets with 100,000+ computed cells or PPTs/DOCs with 100+ pages or 10+ tabs in a web browser all the time.
The thing with MacBooks is that they retain their value significantly better and are much more durable, balanced and cooler machines. As such, you can easily sell your 1lakh MacBook for 75-80k in about 1 years or so or 50-55k in 3 years and move to a newer model effortlessly. This is not true for any other brand out there. 1lakh on any HP, Dell ... etc today will only get you 50-60k in about 1 years and only 15-20k in 3 years along with all the work to move to newer devices.
 
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Dude, I have tried everything in this thin and light space and after years, settled on M3 Macbook Air. Here are the laptops I have used:

- M1 Macbook Pro 8GB/256GB (13.3, 1.4kg)
- LG Gram 17, 16GB, 1TB (large bit weighs 1.2kg tho)
- Thinkpad L13, 32GB (13inch, 1.3kg)
- Switched to desktop in the middle (old ryzen + 2070S)
- M3 Macbook Air 24GB 512GB (1.25kg)

And I have learnt that there's no laptop that comes close to Mac in power management. Here are the things Apple does right that Windows laptops just fail at:

- Holding full performance at battery
- Not eating battery at sleep/suspend
- 7+ hour battery life (Usually 10+ hour battery life actually)
- Instant sleep and resume like a cellphone
- Remaining smooth no matter what, even with full RAM

I used Linux on all the other laptops and have been using Linux on laptops for a decade so I know Linux well, but M1 just spoiled me.

If you want an actual portable thin and light laptops then these power advantages that M chips have make them surprisingly usable as a ultra portable machine. My M3 with 24GB RAM can seemingly do anything I throw at it. I even ran stable diffusion models locally and it can do it all on battery especially with newer improved models.

I can't find a better laptop than Macs. If you can afford it then go for it. Let me know if you have any questions comparing both ecosystems as I've heavily used both.
 
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I personally am using a Fujitsu CH notebook. Cause my top priority was Low-weight. This weighs less than 1kg. Excellent IGZO display with good resolution. Excellent keyboard. Excellent Macbook like trackpad with Lenovo style left-right click keys. HDMI display in/out port (can also be used for playing content from smartphone/any device to laptop display). USB65w charging. USB A port and USB C ports. Headphone jack. Fantastic 4-mic array. IR camera. 16GB DDR5. Low price @55k. List of pros is HUGEEEE.
Cons: Alot less battery life than M1.
Mine is 11th gen i5. Current version on sale seems following:
I dint buy Apple as I was using Macbook before Fujitsu, and battery cost was 20k, charger had conked off already. Parts are expensive in Apple territory.
 
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reddevilgautam said:
As the the topic says, looking for a smallish laptop (13-14 inch) with good performance. My most important criteria is long life - I want to use the laptop for atleast 4 preferably 5 years. I am in real estate and hence would prefer a nice design. Would mainly be used for excel, ppt, docs etc and I would be using it to project on tv etc a lot. Prefer a 16gb RAM.

So far I have shortlisted the Samsung Book 2 Pro 13 inch primarily due to its small stylish design.

Open to macbook M1 as well as Apple generally lasts very long, plus it's a great design as well (I don't have an Apple phone). Would it make sense to buy it 2024?
Click to expand...
If you want to save some money and dip into the Mac ecosystem, you can definitely go for the 16GB 512GB config of the MacBook Air M1. Still kicks ass in 2024 for my mixed productivity, development and entertainment needs. Even MKBHD echoed my thoughts in the recent M3 Air review. The design is outdated for sure but I believe it fares a lot better thermally—my family also has an M2 15" Air and it definitely gets hotter faster. I believe M3 also might have similar or worse thermal signature but even then, they all fare a lot better than most Windows laptops with fans out there so it's not bothersome most of the time. Maybe @SangeetDev can share more on how his experience has been w.r.t thermals. The battery life is phenomenal for my mixed usage and I use it unplugged around the house all the time.

Whether it'll last long though depends but most of my Apple devices (there are a lot of them) are chugging along just fine and the build quality is usually exceptional. But I will strongly recommend you get AppleCare+ or comparable insurance coverage to avoid a hefty fees in case something does happen since Apple repairs are expensive.
 
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guest_999 said:
These are Chinese oem laptops(manufactured by lenovo), any Japanese company laptop built in Japan is sold within Japan only nowadays.
Click to expand...

worth checking :


Packer [16:30] Anishaa Goyal3 Shimane Fujitsu Limited Ltd, 1180-6, Mitsugane, Hikawa-cho, Izumo City, Shimane Prefecture, Japan 699-04050
Importer Lenovo(India) Private Limited, RBD Icon, Level 2, Doddenakundi Village, Marathahalli Outer Ring Road, K. R. Puram Hobli, Bangalore 560037, Karnataka, India
 
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babhishek said:
worth checking :


Packer[16:30] Anishaa Goyal3 Shimane Fujitsu Limited Ltd, 1180-6, Mitsugane, Hikawa-cho, Izumo City, Shimane Prefecture, Japan 699-04050
ImporterLenovo(India) Private Limited, RBD Icon, Level 2, Doddenakundi Village, Marathahalli Outer Ring Road, K. R. Puram Hobli, Bangalore 560037, Karnataka, India
Click to expand...
Yes I have seen some comments on reddit that say nowadays for some models Fujitsu get the components from China & then assemble it in Japan for export. You can see that importer is lenovo only so almost certainly the parts came from lenovo only that it was assembled in Japan.
 
Am using a Zenbook 13 (5600U) and it holds up fine. However, newer models are nearly around 1L (mine was around 85k). Check for clearance sales in croma where you might get this for 65k

LG Gram is too flimsy for my use, but for CXO levels its fine. Also its heavily throttled.

Dell latitude 52XX and 72XX are also great

No need to only take the MBA, its a sunk cost fallacy for some. And yes, i have the Apple ecosystem (mba/mini/ipad/iphone) but rarely use it. Prefer Android/windows/linux.
 
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sato1986 said:
I personally am using a Fujitsu CH notebook. Cause my top priority was Low-weight. This weighs less than 1kg. Excellent IGZO display with good resolution. Excellent keyboard. Excellent Macbook like trackpad with Lenovo style left-right click keys. HDMI display in/out port (can also be used for playing content from smartphone/any device to laptop display). USB65w charging. USB A port and USB C ports. Headphone jack. Fantastic 4-mic array. IR camera. 16GB DDR5. Low price @55k. List of pros is HUGEEEE.
Cons: Alot less battery life than M1.
Mine is 11th gen i5. Current version on sale seems following:
I dint buy Apple as I was using Macbook before Fujitsu, and battery cost was 20k, charger had conked off already. Parts are expensive in Apple territory.
Click to expand...
I have been eyeing the uhx 2-in-1 models from Fujitsu. They don't seem to have launched the13th gen CPUs yet.
 
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